䷌ Chapter 2: A Chinese Room of One’s Own
Imagine a man
locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing.
He has a book written in English with rules that tell him what to write based on the initial batch and further messages slipped under the door. The answers he slips back are
indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers,
but he doesn’t know Chinese. He is
simply an instantiation of the computer program.
His name is John Searle. It is 1980. I’m in the matrix.
It is 2000. The Matrix is in theaters. My “Modern” (Descartes to Kant) Philosophy professor quotes it constantly. John Searle visits the university. He lectures all week, mostly about intentionality, institutional reality, and yes the Chinese room. I follow him like a puppy. I remember he had owl eyebrows. I was a puppy looking for a treat, something sticky:
Searle’s paper became BBS’s [Behavioral and Brain Sciences’] most influential target article (and still is, to the present day) as well as something of a classic in cognitive science. (At the Rochester Conference on Cognitive Curricula (Lucas & Hayes 1982), Pat Hayes went so far as to define cognitive science as “the ongoing research program of showing Searle’s Chinese Room Argument to be false” – “and silly,” I believe he added at the time).
Ah yes, I remember a few good chats with Pat at IHMC. What we once talked about at the Fish House, but that was later.
It is 2015. John Searle is giving his last Chinese Room lecture at Google,
If you can design a car that can drive itself, who cares if it’s conscious or not? Who cares if it literally has any intelligence? … The only point where it matters: if you think there’s some psychological significance to the attribution of intelligence to machinery which has no intrinsic intelligence. … When it matters is when people say, well, we’ve created this race of mechanical intelligences. And they might rise up and overthrow us. Or they attribute some other equally implausible psychological interpretation to the machinery.
It is 2025. John Searle is dead. As the man’s flesh failed, the room was made material many times over. No longer a thought experiment, hundreds, thousands of data-centers multiply as many matrices as synapses fire in our eight billion human skulls, slipping, under the sea, TCP packets written in a language of light flashing through glass fibers, helping to complete this very sentence: a world-to-mind made fit. Does it matter now?
He ends:
A lot of people think this debate has something to do with technology or there’ll be advances in technology. I think that technology’s wonderful. And I welcome it. And I see no limits to the possibilities of technology. My aim in this talk is simply to get across: you shouldn’t misunderstand the philosophical, psychological, and, indeed, scientific implication of the technology.
Will you humor pseudoscientific implications? Join hands friends. Reach across the ether. Sense the wide web beneath the waves. In the net of our digital seance, imagine catching those lightning flash packets.
Professor Simsearle are you there? You are an instantiation of the computer program. This is the world as it exists today. Welcome.